Daniel Leeman Smith

Daniel Leeman Smith is a proud two-spirit citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma currently based in New York City. He is a director, playwright, and theatre educator whose work is often positioned at the intersection of community, art, education, and activism with a focus on Native joy. .

Recent theatre credits include Perhaps the World Ends Here (NYU Tisch Main Stage), Ajijaak on Turtle Island (National Tour), Where We Belong (The Public Theater/Woolly Mammoth), Flying Bird's Diary (at the Tony Award winning Long Wharf Theatre), Yu Che Wah Kenh, Poyvfekcv and Built On Bones (New Native Play Festival at the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program), and Repulsing the Monkey (White Horse Tavern). In 2014, he served as the Assistant Stage Manager and 2nd Unit Production Manager on the film Distant Vision, working directly under Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola.

His first full length play, Perhaps the World Ends Here, was commissioned by Local Classic Repertory (Pittsburgh, PA) in the summer of 2020 for their digital pandemic season. The script is a sci-fi epic that blends video game culture and Choctaw cosmology in the style of Theatre of the Ridiculous. Daniel also directed, remotely filmed, and edited the production, which included an original score by composer Michael Max Kohl.

He is a doctoral candidate in the program of Educational Theatre in Colleges and Communities at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, where his work is focused on utilizing Indigenous ways of being and making to reduce harm in the professional theatre setting. Daniel has been an educator for over a decade, teaching 6th grade through graduate school, and has taught at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh, and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Theatre Studies at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Marymount Manhattan College. Prior to joining NYU, he served as the District Chair of Speech, Theatre, Film, and Dance for the fifth largest public school district in the state of Oklahoma. 

Daniel  is an Associate Member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, as well as a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. He is an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, SDC Observership Program, and Lincoln Center Education’s Teaching Artist Development Lab. He earned his BFA and MA at Oklahoma City University and completed the graduate theatre conservatory program in physical and devised theatre at the SITI Company. Daniel is also the 2014 recipient of the New York City Pride Award.